**************************************************************
*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
*                                         *
*                                                            *
**************************************************************

Between October 1995 and July 1997 I picked sites for the 
oldest daily web awards honoring the best in content-laden 
Canadian sites. The most difficult part of the job, as you 
could imagine, was actually finding worthwhile sites. I was 
always amazed by the number of web sites people put up that 
were nothing but some animated GIF images and a collection of 
links to other sites. Many of those sites would turn out to be 
simply a page of links to yet more sites. Arg!

A lot has changed since I first logged onto the net back in 
1993. What hasn't changed is that content is still king. My 
favorite sites are low chrome pages with loads of text -- sites 
that offer a database or archive of information. Below are some 
of my favorite info rich haunts:

Internet Movie Database
us.imdb.com

For more than 8 years, netizens have helped build the Internet 
Movie Database, a searchable, interactive guide to over 120,000 
movies. The Internet Movie Database is like having a press kit 
for nearly any film at your finger tips: you can get plot 
summaries, performance credits, and links to images. You can 
cross reference performers and find out what other movies 
they've stared in. 

The Nobel Prize Internet Archive
www.almaz.com/nobel

The Nobel Prize Internet Archive features a complete list of 
all Nobel prize winners, biographies, and relevant links. The 
archive, naturally, breaks the list of winners down by the 
usual categories (physics, chemistry, etc.), but also provides 
a revealing list of women Nobel prize winners. In the prize's 
nearly 100 year history, thirty women have won in every 
category except, oddly, economics. The archive doesn't just 
honor humankind's greatest intellectual achievements. The 
archive also celebrates the worst with its Ig Nobel Prize 
section. Winners for 1997 include "spam king" Sanford Wallace 
of Cyber Promo infamy and a couple biologists who measured 
brain wave patterns while people chewed different flavors of 
gum.

International Lyrics Server
www.lyrics.ch

Ever wonder what the words are to "Louie Louie" or Nirvana's 
"Smells Like Teen Spirit"? These mysteries and more can be 
solved by paying a visit to the International Lyrics Server 
instead of convening a congressional committee and getting the 
FBI involved. You can search for songs based on artist, song 
title, or album. If you don't know the complete name of the 
song, you can punch in a few key terms and the server will do a 
match. Be warned, there are a lot of songs contained in this 
archive, so you better make your searches fairly exact. For 
example, a search on songs with "girl" in the title returns 
over four hundred hits.


Gods Among Directors
www.godamongdirectors.com

You'll find an archive of scripts here by directors such as 
Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez (the guy who made /El 
Mariachi/), and Martin Scorsese. Oddly enough, this site 
contains more scripts for movies by other directors but there 
doesn't seem to be a way to access them from the main page. You 
can find scripts for films like /Trainspotting/ and /Aliens/ by 
using a back entrance provide at the Scripts-O-Rama page at 
www.script-o-rama.com/table.shtml. I'm sure these pages violate 
all sorts of copyright laws so, ah hem, I don't recommend you 
visit unless it's for educational purposes only. And it can be 
very educational. Many of the scripts, notably the script for 
/2001: A Space Odyssey/, are earlier drafts and deviate in 
interesting ways from the final product.

Project Gutenberg
www.promo.net/pg/
Since 1991, Project Gutenberg has been converting public domain 
works of literature to simple ASCII text format and making them 
available free of charge over the net. Project Gutenberg offers 
work ranging from /Aesop's Fables/ to the works of Oscar Wilde. 
Project Gutenberg entered its 1000th listing September 4, 1997, 
which was Dante's /Divine Comedy/.

    Source: geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs/text

               ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson/cs)                   ( geocities.com/lapetitelesson)